April 28th, 2012 -- by Bacchus
Plug It In
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Shorter URL for sharing: https://www.erosblog.com/?p=8073
Shorter URL for sharing: https://www.erosblog.com/?p=8073
I wish I understood what was going through the artist’s head when he designed those controls. What sort of mysterious device is this, that sports both a knife switch (that appears to be open, to boot) and a stop button? And is that a spool of magnetic tape in the lower left corder of the illustration? What its function?
I am confused. Think I shall go drink whiskey and then lie down.
Stop, hold, start, it looks like there’s a master switch perhaps, and the spools holds a program that controls the vibration pattern? Then there’s also the controls on the wand itself, which look a little close to the business end, but then, it’s just an artist’s rendition
I think Timothy Leary said it best, back in 1967, with Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase “Turn on, plug in, get off!”.
…maybe I’m paraphrasing a bit there…
http://en.wikip...p_out
This is very prescient of the current internet. You don’t have an electric-chair switch on your Ipad?
Not only does it have a STOP button, it has a HELP! button as well, complete with the exclamation point!
I’m not sure what the difference is…maybe HELP! summons the other four women. :)
As an engineer, I see that box and think:
1) The magnetic tape is to store various ‘programs’ where a program consists of an audio track who’s frequency and amplitude get reproduced in the tip of the ‘probe’. This allows the user to create many different types of ‘music’ that can be played back for various occasions. Mix tape anyone?
2) What looks like a knife switch is really an master gain control. You can adjust the overall volume of the amplifier with this control, allowing you to tune the playback of the ‘program’ as it is in progress. It has to be big so that it’s easy to grab and adjust (upward) even with your eyes closed. Various user studies with early prototypes of this device showed that small rotating knobs did not give the users the feeling of being in control without undue concentration on manipulating the gain knob.
3) The different colored buttons control not only overall operation of the device (play, stop, etc.) but also add various filters to the playback. One is for random gain changes (both increase and decrease) to keep the user from perfectly predicting what comes next.
4) The indicator lights across the top give visual indication of the device’s overall mode (playing, paused, rewind, etc.) as well as the on/off status of each filter, as the colored buttons don’t show any state information.
Oh, this is way too much fun. I’m gonna have to go build one of these guys now. Anybody know where I put my box of eccentric motors?
I’ve seen this sort of knife switch on (old) television equipment before – the position it’s at in the picture is nominally off. Moving it to either end selects either “Channel A” or “Channel B”, or some similar effect. The contacts are hidden behind the panel of the machine, and form a 90 degree angle, with ‘off’ at 45 degrees. It saves panel space when you have a lot of controls to pack into a small front panel, though it does make the switch deeper.
The tape is surely the storage device – a recorded ‘program’ for the device to follow. Either that, or this is one of those music-activated vibrators, that acts more strongly or less strongly, depending on the music being played. The artist was surely familiar with reel-to-reel audio tape recorders, and the big spools of magnetic tape seen commonly on computers of the time.